Outer Banks (13 page)

“Do you think she really has?” I said to Cecie that night.

“Probably,” Cecie said. “I have a feeling it's no bigger thing to Ginger than sleeping late or dancing or eating pizza. It all feels good and makes her happy, so why not?”

“Do you ever wish it was that simple?”

“I've always thought it probably was going to be that simple, when I got right down to it,” Cecie said equably. “It's just a matter of finding the person it'll be simple with. That's the one requirement. Can you imagine doing it with Grunt?”

“Well, it would be simple with Grunt, all right,” I said. “Wham bam, thank you ma'am. The thing is, I can't really imagine doing it with anybody.”

“You will,” she said.

School closed that Friday for spring break, and the night before, Ginger put her head into our room and said, “I just talked to my folks, and they're going to open the house at Nag's Head this weekend. Daddy said if y'all would like to come up with me he'd send Robert for us with the car and he'd drive us up, and bring us back next week in time for classes. Please come. I want to show Daddy what kind of friends I have. He won't believe it.”

We said yes before the words were out of her mouth. I had been dreading going home to the crumbling house on the Santee where my mother entertained, prissily, the disapproving deacon, and the prospect of adventure was always manna to Cecie. Fig was beside herself. She prattled about suntan lotion and Rose Marie Reid swimsuits and summer houses until Ginger told her, good-naturedly, to shut up. I felt an unexpected pang of pity for her, watching her put dreadful and inappropriate things into an aqua plastic Samsonite suitcase. This trip must be, to her, akin to a street urchin's being invited to the palace. It was something she had never even aspired to. A kind of irritated protectiveness flooded me. I could already feel the cool eyes of Ginger's rich mother on her.

“Robert and the car” proved, astoundingly, to be an enormous Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a jump seat in back, driven by an impassive middle-aged white man in a dark sack suit and a peaked chauffeur's cap. Cecie and Fig simply stared, mouths open, as he loaded our luggage into the trunk and held the doors for us. Even I stared. I had seen chauffeured automobiles before, but not at Randolph. The rest of the chapter stood on the steps and hung out windows, goggling frankly. Ginger stomped about cheerfully, but her neck and cheeks were dull red under the freckles. We had long known that there was money behind Fowler Mills, of course, but none of us had much concept of wealth, and Ginger went to elaborate pains to conceal her provenance. Her clothes were plain and disheveled to the near-edge of shabbiness, and she had brought no car to school with her. We forgot, for long stretches
of time, that the cold, fast Warrior River pumped money into C. D. “Buck” Fowler's pockets as steadily as it powered his mills. But we would not forget now.

Robert acknowledged Ginger's introduction with a nod so scant and a brow so thunderous that we were intimidated. But Ginger giggled as she watched him toss our luggage into the vast trunk.

“He's mad,” she whispered. “Daddy's regular driver is Woodrow and Robert feels like driving a bunch of giggling college girls is beneath him. Usually he works in the mill.”

“Where's Woodrow?” Cecie said.

“Well, you know,” Ginger said. “Woodrow is a Negro. We're going to have to stop overnight in Charlotte or somewhere, and…it's just better if Robert drives. But he feels like he's been demoted. I'll bet you he doesn't say five words between here and the Outer Banks.”

And he didn't. The new green of the advancing spring streamed across Alabama and Georgia and into North Carolina, and we chattered and giggled and slept and woke again, and Robert drove stoically, stopping only when Ginger pleaded, “Robert, I don't think we can wait till you get low on gas. And we're hungry. Please stop the next place you see.”

And he would, silently. He would be waiting in the car, eyes straight ahead, when we came gratefully out of the rest room, and we ate our candy bars and potato chips and drank our Cokes on the road. I never saw Robert eat, and I never saw him go into a men's room.

The next afternoon, after a straight, seemingly endless, grind across North Carolina's fertile black flatlands, we crossed the Albemarle River and then Roanoke Sound, at Manteo, and turned left onto a narrow, pitted blacktop road that paralleled the coast. It was lined with small, unpainted beach shacks on stilts, and bait and souvenir shops, and an occasional fish restaurant; on the left, on the land side, great dunes lifted their heads into the paling sky,
larger dunes than any I had ever seen, even on the Cape. They were small sand mountains; they were awesome, out of humanity's scale. They were covered with low, scrubby vegetation, but there were no houses on them, and no roads seemed to lead up to them. On the right, more unpretentious beach houses lifted their second and third stories above another, lowered line of dunes that fringed the ocean. But the ocean itself was out of sight. It was both a wild landscape and an entirely banal one. I was obscurely disappointed. The Outer Banks had always been in my mind the very epitome of wildness and romance.

Then Robert turned the big car off the blacktop onto a narrow sandtrack that led through the secondary dune line, straight toward the hidden sea, and I saw them for the first time, the grand old Unpainted Aristocracy of Nag's Head. A line of perhaps thirty or forty huge old beach houses, side by side at the crest of the primary dune line, alone against the pearled evening sky like a congregation of crouching witches looking out to sea. They were enormous, tall, black-weathered, stark against the horizon, unsoftened by trees or plantings or much of anything else. Just the great, shifting, breastlike curves of the sand and the houses and the empty sky. They stood, all of them, on great stilts, like massive old crones on reed-thin legs, and they soared three and sometimes, with widow's walks and crows' nests, four stories into the sweet, streaming salt air. I felt something old and slow and heretofore undiscovered turn over in my chest, as if a sleeping homunculus had wakened.

Robert pulled the car up into the soft sand yard of one of the last houses in the line, and we got out, stretching and sniffing and staring, silent. The house was a beetling, shingled Victorian pile, weathered dark gray to near-black, its turrets and towers roofed with lighter gray cedar shake, its seemingly countless deep-shuttered windows open to the sea wind. It had portholes and millwork and chimney pots and cupolas and porches and gray steps connecting many levels of decking; it sat in a feathery nest of
beach grass, and had a border of old wax myrtle, yaupon, bayberry, and Spanish bayonet. A line of stunted black-green Norfolk pines made a windbreak that, with the line of the dunes' crown, shut the sea from sight. But we could hear it, booming hollowly on the beach below and beyond us. Ginger ran up the wooden steps to greet her parents, who were standing on the deck, waving their welcome. Fig trailed her like a puppy. Cecie and I, without a word and with one accord, went straight through the pines and over the dunes as if sung to the sea by a water witch.

We stood on the high green crown and looked down at the sea. A wooden walkway led from the porch down through the low, scrubby vegetation to the tan sand itself. The walkway was weathered to near-black like the house, and it snaked its way through drifts of sea oats, beach grass, and a dense, low matting of little running plants and flowers I could not name. The sand itself was powdery and soft, drifting like whipped cream and then melting into damp, packed flatness and finally a shining mirror where earth met water. The combers marched in stately and perfect, unhurried and unimpeded in their progress straight from Spain. The water, except for where it broke white on the beach, was the deep, true blue of gentians, or lapis lazuli. No one was on the beach below, and no sails broke the great, tossing blueness, and no sound but the hollow boom…hushhhh of the water and the bronze calling of gulls reached our ears. The wind was straight off the sea and fresh and nearly chilly, blowing our hair straight back, but the sun on the backs of our necks and shoulders was still hot.

We stood for a while, not speaking. When we heard Ginger calling out to us, we turned toward the house. We stopped once more. On the sea side it was all glass, one entire wall a great arched window that came to a point up under the eaves, framed in gray Victorian millwork and unimpeded by panes. The half-oval of glass must have been two full stories tall; inside we could see, dimly, a great stone wall dominated by a huge fireplace and shining bare
floors and oversized furniture set about, and an enormous refectory dining table and chairs. It was simple, but the total effect was breath-stopping. Its impact was, I saw, all in its scale, and in the uninterrupted mingling of living space and sea and sky. The architect who had envisioned this window had known what true enchantment was.

“Oh, Lord,” Cecie murmured. I thought it was a prayer. “Amen,” I said. And we turned from the sea and went in to meet Ginger's parents.

Fig told me later that she had been a little disappointed with the house.

“I mean, they hadn't even painted it,” she said. “It was big and all, but with all that money, you'd have thought they might get something, you know, a little grander. It just doesn't look like rich.”

But I had seen the austere, sprawling old summer enclaves of the truly wealthy on the islands and beaches of the Northeast, and I knew what this house said. I was unalterably and forever lost to it by the time I set foot on the first step leading up to the deck; I could feel my very bones softening with love and yearning for this crazy, wind-borne old house, and my heart aching fiercely with the wanting of it. To this day, long gone to earth in my own much-loved house by the sea some eight hundred miles north of it, I still dream of Ginger Fowler's house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everything about it, and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep-buried wildness in my heart. I, who had never found earth beneath my feet that called “home” up to me, here found home raging through my entire body like an ague.

“If I ever get married I want to spend my honeymoon here,” I said, smiling at Ginger's mother and taking her outstretched hands in mine.

“You can have it for as long as you want it, if you'll let me
be your bridesmaid,” Ginger said, wriggling with the happiness of showing this treasure to us.

“Me, too,” Fig chimed.

“Well, why not just have the wedding here, then?” Mrs. Fowler smiled, and “It's a deal,” I said, and we went into the house where Ginger's father waited to impale steaks on skewers and immolate them, and the week flowed forward.

Late that night a storm broke over the house. Ginger's father had told us he thought one was likely; it was, he said, the season for the great spring thunderstorms, and he had seen the vast sweeps of the feathery mare's-tail clouds riding in off the sea earlier in the day.

“Outer Banks are the storm capital of the world,” he said, with the genial, savage authority with which he said everything. He was a giant blond copy of Ginger, with a blunt red face, white eyebrows and lashes, narrow blue eyes, and a perennial shout that made even his frequent sallies into humor threatening. I could see why Ginger had remained the sweet-tempered child that she was; it was clear that that was how Buck Fowler wanted her, and it would have taken a daughter of far rarer complexity, toughness, and guile to circumvent him than Ginger. I doubted that I could have. Cecie might have.

“Right down the coast yonder, at Hatteras, the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current come together, and it kicks up such a fuss that they call it the graveyard of the Atlantic,” Buck Fowler said. “More than five hundred ships have gone aground there. Up here at Nag's Head, too. Way it got its name, the old-time Bankers used to hang lanterns on the heads and tails of their horses and lead 'em along the dunes down the beach, and the ships would think they were heading into safe harbor and go aground on the shoals right out there. Bankers would come out and plunder 'em.”

And he laughed hugely. I shivered. In my mind's eye I could see it, the black raging seas, and the splintered ships sliding slowly under the surf, and the screams in the darkness, and the silent
rowboats coming on inexorably, like a flock of poisonous water insects…. When we were lying in the twin beds in the room Mrs. Fowler had given us that night, that faced the porch and the sea, and had turned off the light so that the faint silver line of the surf shone like ghost water, I said to Cecie, “What do you think of them?”

“She's nice,” Cecie's voice came through the darkness. “But he's…he's something else again. I think he'd have loved to be right out there with those pirates, carrying off the spoils from dead men. He makes my blood run cold.”

“Mine, too,” I said. “Poor Ginger. But this place. Cecie…what about this place?”

“It's better than cancer,” Cecie said drowsily, and we laughed, and slid into that thick black sleep that the sea sends.

When the lighting and thunder and the great, booming surf woke me hours later, I could see instantly, from the malign white flashes of the lightning bolts, that Cecie's bed was empty, and she was not in the room. Alarm had me on my feet and at the door of our room before I consciously thought of getting up. I did not know why I was uneasy; it was likely that she was in the bathroom, down the hall. I padded barefoot out into the hall and looked, but the door was ajar and the room dark and empty. I went silently through the sleeping house in my shorty pajamas, and out onto the porch. Cold rain blew almost horizontally onto the porch, so furiously that I could not see into and through it. I peered along the walkway through the dunes down to the beach. It, too, was black, and roared with the fury of the storm. I was suddenly terribly, terribly frightened.